McCormick the Place

McCormick the Place

Bob Edmonds,
long-time writer and author of local history, has released McCormick the Place,
502 pages (now in softcover). Using a wealth of archival resources, the author
details in down-to-earth terms the everyday life of people living in a small
South Carolina county now called McCormick -- from antebellum through the Post
World War II era.

In the
preface of McCormick the Place, Edmonds describes his early life among the
Greatest Generation People of his neighborhood during the Great Depression.
Embedded in the dialogue of the book are valuable elements of social, cultural,
and economic history, folk music, photographs of old schools and scholars, the
founding of the town of McCormick and McCormick County, as well as the
must-read story of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposed socialist
experiment in McCormick County.

One chapter
contains 100 pages of interesting and colorful newspaper excerpts, which depict
events that shaped the community.

A full chapter
is devoted to the town’s benefactor, Cyrus Hall McCormick that mirrors the
ambitious spirit of the young American republic. McCormick’s invention of the
reaper for harvesting grain and his creation of a gigantic farm equipment
manufacturing conglomerate in Chicago during the Industrial Revolution produced
a worldwide transformation of agriculture. LIFE magazine named the invention in
“One Hundred Events That Shaped America.” Cyrus McCormick’s investment and
ultimate purchase of the Dorn Gold Mine and his influence in the acquisition of
a railroad terminal at the mine site clinched the founding of the town of
McCormick. Cyrus McCormick and his wife Nettie were early supporters of
world-renown evangelist Dwight L. Moody and played a key role in the founding
of the Moody Bible Institute and the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago.
The McCormicks liberally contributed to many colleges and schools in several
states. After Cyrus’s death, Nettie McCormick donated a considerable sum of
money for constructing seven homes and a school at Thornwell Orphanage in
Clinton, S. C., during the institution’s difficult early years.

The inclusion of a collection of 500 photographs
in the book transcends time in a way that words could never. Photographs create
a visual record of history and heritage, and offer honest records of people as
they lived, and as they wanted to be seen.